New Perspectives in Science Education

This study is about a large-scale teacher professional development project aimed at supporting middle school in-service science teachers’ professional competence about nature of science (NOS). The purpose of this study is to investigate the changes of teachers’ NOS views in a continuing professional development (CPD) program. In this study, a CPD program was implemented for a year with voluntary attendance of 18 middle school science teachers. The intervention process with the science teachers consisted of ten monthly meetings, each lasting about 8 hours, over two semesters. In this process teachers were introduced in a collaborative and reflective environment to various NOS aspects and ways of using explicit instruction and formative assessment in their NOS teaching. Also, the teaching activities and materials were provided to teachers to be implemented in their classrooms for one year. Participant’s NOS understandings were assessed through face-to-face interviews at the beginning and end of the second stage. Questions of the VNOS-C (Views on Nature of Science Questionnaire, Form C) developed by Abd-El-Khalick (1998) were utilized as the questions of the interview guide. Data were analyzed with content analysis in the light of eight themes (the empirical NOS, scientific method, the tentative NOS, the nature of scientific theories and laws, inference and theoretical entities in science, the subjective and theory-laden NOS, social and cultural embeddedness of science, and imagination and creativity in science) determined by authors based on the literature. Teachers’ views were classified into three categories as ‘naive’, ‘eclectic’ and ‘informed’ for each theme. In the light of the analyses of the interviews conducted at the beginning and end of the CPD program, an improvement was observed in all participant teachers’ NOS views.  When considered the NOS themes that were aimed to be developed in the program, the ratio of teachers who had naive views about these themes decreased whereas the ratio of teachers sharing informed views increased. As a result of the CPD program organized within the scope of the project, the nature of science theme in which the furthest progress was made is ‘scientific method’. Another theme in which a high level of progress was made after the practice is the ‘imagination and creativity in science’ theme. The improvement achieved in ‘nature of scientific theories and laws’ theme as a result of the CPD program was less than expected